After finishing my FR IX, I guess I couldn't stay away. So here's my next Spitfire build. As most have probably guessed, this will be MH434 from the film Battle of Britain.

I'll be using the fundekäls sheet for the markings.

The biggest hurdle I had was that I had previously assembled most of the wing. In doing so, I used the wrong cannon fairing bulges.

To replicate the look of the .303 armed MK II Spitfire, the cannon barrels and their fairings were removed. This meant I had to remove them from my wing. I decided to try and cut them off with a small razor saw.

This worked out better than I thought and I managed to get both fairings removed without damaging any of the detail on the surrounding panels.

Next were the leading edge inserts. I used sprue from the kit to plug the openings.

Then I sanded them to their approximate shape.

The inserts were then attached to the wings and the final shaping will be done once they're dry. I also filled in the holes in the wing panels with sheet styrene.

Glad you decided to build another Spitfire alongside the Esprit Carl. Neat work so far.
I guess you'll need to rescribe the .303 gun hatches and add the openings in the wing leading edge? Or did this airframe retain the cannon hatches for the movie?

Interested to follow along on this one.

Cheers.

Thanks Guy! It wasn't a hard decision. I enjoyed building the FR IX so much that it was easy to just get this one out.

According to the markings info, the cannon hatches were just just covered with that panels. It was done for appearance rather than operation.

' Rat a tat, tat tat... ' coming along at a good pace now just like the guns in the skies !

All that wing panel sanding reminds me of my Alley Cat PR Spitfire conversion, keep up the great work Carl.

Regards. Andy

I know, I built one as well. Actually, I have a second set in the stash that I thought about taking some of the inserts from. I decided they'd still need work to make them fit so I might as well stick to styrene.